During the texturing process it's crucial to maintain the same resolution for all the textures, so that your cut-out and pasted pieces don't appear too blurry in comparison to the rest of the textures. For more complex textures I keep all layers in separate folders (including specular and normal maps) to make navigation much easier for me - and for others if they wish to work with my PSD files. I'm really keen on working with brushes, not only to paint details or masks but also to add highlights/shadows to make textures even more interesting. I'm always painting my textures using a tablet - it speeds up the whole process a lot (Fig.06).

Fig. 06

As you can see from Fig.07, there are a few examples of the techniques and methods used, showing how I used the Total Textures and tweaked them by applying various blending modes/masks/colours/ contrast/ saturation corrections. It's handy to use Levels before mixing textures and Colour Range for selections. At this stage I discovered that experimenting with different things is the best way to achieve the goal you are aiming for. Please also remember to bake an occlusion pass to help you to spot places where details such as cracks and dirt should be placed.

Fig. 07

Finally, I created specular and normal maps, rendered the occlusion, shadow and specular passes, made some colour correction and final touches in Photoshop (Fig.08).

Fig. 08

That's all folks! I hope you've enjoyed this, and maybe you've even managed to learn something new. I personally found working with the Total Textures very easy and efficient, and I'm glad that I had an opportunity to try something new with them. Thanks!